Hitachi has announced plans to have a commercial 3.5-inch hard drive on the market that can hold 5TB. They hope for this to be available by 2010.

Hard drive specialist Hitachi Global Storage Technologies is continuing to push HDDs to the limit, with a strong emphasis on increasing capacity and with a clear goal in mind.

The space will be achieved using 'current perpendicular-to-the-plane giant magnetoresistance', or in short, CPP-GMR.CPP-GMR pushes data density above 1TB per square inch, a long-awaited threshold that promises drives many times larger than those available today.